Holiday Reading

I had an extraordinarily busy day yesterday. It was my last day at work before going on vacation for two weeks and I needed to tie up lots of loose ends. I finished the day with no emails requiring action in my inbox... quite a result.

WebSphere Process Server is hot right now.... I'll be sorry to be away from the action. Customers really get it. Process Server is designed from the ground-up to support writing composite applications - making SOA a reality. The core concepts of the Service Component Architecture and the fact that it is built on top of a J2EE application server (WebSphere Application Server) mean that some classes of previously difficult problems become almost trivial and it's exciting to be able to show people how their problems can be solved elegantly and coherently.

I spent a lot of yesterday walking a colleague through some of the presentations we give on the internal advanced education class for consultants as he will be helping deliver it next week in the UK in my absence. It made me realise that some of our materials over-complicate things. There was one deck, in particular, that was over 40 pages long but only contained three real concepts. It is easy to take a simple concept and make it difficult.... I need to watch out for this when I return and fight it whenever I see it happening. This product does make a lot of problems simpler and our materials shouldn't hide this fact

So, with that behind me for two weeks, I can think about my vacation.

New York beckons on Thursday for a week. Thanks to my inability to collect points on a single programme, the reward flights consist of BA outbound and Virgin back. I had enough points for Virgin Premium Economy on the way back and, after a few recent trips, now have enough points to hop up another class to Upper Class on the way back. Slight problem: they haven't released any more seats yet. I'll be phoning every day next week until they do. It will give us something to look forward to at the end of the holiday.

I've been meaning to finally understand how Economics works for ages. This will be the vacation when it happens. I have just bought a copy of The Wealth Of Nations by Adam Smith. I am determined to complete it before I return to work. Let's see if I do....